Another Quiet Day

Who Cares About the Rest of Us?

Caterina Fake, flickr-co-founder I believe, writes this here thing on a talk by Keoki Andrus on "Getting High Performance Out of High Potential People" (warning, a powerpoint file):

Top Ten Ways to Build Passion

1. Respond maturely to failure and setbacks

2. Push Power down

So I only got two of them. But he also had a list of how to demoralize and demotivate people. And I only got the first two of those:

How to Demoralize and Demotivate High Potential People

1. Work overload

2. Lack of autonomy, aka Micromanagement. Apparently the #1 complaint among High Potential people.

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Unless he means "everybody who works at the company" when he says "High Potential People" this is just elitist claptrap catered to pampering the incompetent sons and daughters of CEOs and managers by treating them differently.

The real point being that, if this powerpoint is the same as Caterina talks about, all of these ten points are methods to increase the loyalty, passion and productivity of all employees.

This entire thing reads like a guide towards common management deficiencies in modern companies and how to remove them only for the employees that matter. The rest of the plebeian serfs aren't worthy of respect.

I hope I'm wrong and that I'm getting the wrong impression, but mismanagement via arbitrary or nepotistic elitism is, for some reason, a common trend in management advice these days.

Baldur Bjarnason – 28/8/06